Saturday, April 8, 2017

AeternoBlade's Freyja's Power

AeternoBlade is a rather obscure action RPG with a decent, creative plot involving a heaping load of time travel, a fairly well-executed theme of the terrible and corrupting nature of wrath and vengeance, and a serviceable cast of characters It has an imaginative gameplay system that generally works, functional graphics, and a middling soundtrack. And it has one of the most powerful RPG protagonists of all time.

There really aren’t many other RPG characters I can think of whom Freyja would not be able to defeat, save ones like, say, Goku (Dragon Ball Z has had RPGs made about it, remember), who are just outright invulnerable to conventional attacks made with a sword. But as long as a foe can, conceivably, be defeated by being stabbed and slashed with a sword, even if it’s a case where it would take hundreds of sword strokes to do it...Freyja would invariably come out of a battle between them as the victor. Hell, even in the case of a character like Goku, where she literally can’t harm him, a fight between them would probably end in Freyja’s retreat more than an outright loss.

What makes Freyja insanely unstoppable is her sword, the Aeterno Blade,* and the way it does this is twofold. First of all, it...well, it basically lets her be Tracer from Overwatch, if you increased Tracer’s temporal powers several times over. The Aeterno Blade allows Freyja to perform a small little time-space dash forward, which basically blinks her out of time for a moment, allowing her to evade enemy attacks by invincibly passing through them in time. She can’t do this in rapid succession, but the recharge time on this is still short, like half a second, so Freyja’s ability to dodge her foes’ attacks and close a distance gap (which is kinda necessary for a sword-user) is quite effective.

More importantly from the Tracer-esque half of the Aeterno Blade’s repertoire is the ability it grants Freyja to rewind her own actions (while remaining fully conscious of their consequences), and in the process heal herself from any damage she took during that time, should she be mortally wounded. So, essentially, if an enemy manages to strike a fatal blow against Freyja, she can rewind her own timeline by half a minute or so, and bring herself back to before that fatal moment in as good condition as she was, with the knowledge of what’s going to happen and, presumably, how to avoid it. And Freyja can activate this rewind ability pretty much at the brink of, or even beyond, death. After all, any time she dies in the game, you have a few seconds as she lies there to begin rewinding her back to life. So yeah. Freyja has the ability to rewind time from even beyond the grip of death to bring herself back to life, with preternatural insight on what not to do in her immediate future.

So, already we’re talking about an individual who is extremely difficult to defeat, because if you’re fighting Freya and she’s using the powers I’ve mentioned, she’s blinking through most of your attacks and keeps seeming to know exactly how to counter the finishing strikes you might have landed on her, knowing they’re coming practically before even you do. And it’s worth noting that even beyond the powers that the Aeterno Blade confers to Freyja, she’s no slouch at combat. She has an impressive, physics-defying repertoire of sword skills, can use magic to call down meteors on her foes (which is pretty much always a high-level attack spell, regardless of which RPG you go by), and can do that double-jump thing that’s so popular in action RPGs. Already we’re talking about a pretty damned dangerous combatant...and I haven’t even gone into the details of the other half of the Aeterno Blade’s time control that Freyja possesses.

The other side of Freyja’s temporal abilities is extrapersonal time reversal. See...in most cases, a character who can stop or incredibly slow time is almost unbeatable, such as Sailor Moon: Another Story’s Sailor Pluto, or The Flash when he’s really not kidding around. When Feena stops time in battle for a few rounds during Grandia 1, it gives her a chance to fully heal the party up, and do some damage to her enemy, all without needing fear a single attack to her person. Likewise, Sailor Pluto breaks Sailor Moon: Another Story, able to freeze time for her enemy for 3 rounds, allowing the Senshi to heal themselves and launch attacks, and then just as time for the enemy restarts, she can freeze them again. This extraordinarily broken gameplay mechanic even works on the final boss!

Very impressive stuff, to be sure. But Freyja makes even that level of power look like a joke. She can, at will, make the entirety of time and space rewind itself for several seconds (at full power, it’s roughly a full minute), starting and stopping everything around her as she pleases. She herself, however, is an outside entity to this rewinding, and can act as she wishes...which means that during this period of time marching backward, she can deal damage to an enemy, damage that will (for some reason) remain with said enemy even as it reverses back before she stabbed it. You could attack her, and before you even connected, she’d reverse you back to when you first started that attack, and stab you in the heart as she was doing it, so from your perspective, the first lurching step you take at her is suddenly, inexplicably your last as a gaping hole appears in your chest. From the viewpoint of her enemies, she can and is everywhere but where their attack is about to land, as 1 fatal slash after another instantaneously appear on them. She could spend half a minute dodging blows from you, suddenly reverse time, and deliver a fatal strike as you go back through your every action, and bam! From the perspective of the rest of the universe, you somehow got sliced in half a few seconds before you even had seen that she was there.

Also worth noting in regards to this ability is that there is an accessory that Freyja can equip to the blade that causes her to regenerate her health while she’s rewinding the world around her, so she can be constantly healing even as she’s making you do an impression of a moon-walking pincushion. There is no time during which she’s using her powers in which she can’t also be regenerating herself back to peak condition. Y’know. Just for a little extra overpowered zest.

Seriously, aside from an enemy that she just outright cannot damage with a sword or meteors, there is no individual I can think of originating from RPGs that Freyja would not be able to defeat, and even the ones she couldn’t actually harm, she could still escape from and/or stalemate. It’s too bad that AeternoBlade is so obscure, because it’s created one of the most powerful fictional characters ever to exist, and it seems kind of like it did so without even trying.

And that’s all I have to say today. Tune in next time for a rant wherein I’m not gushing about how super cool and strong some character is like I’m goddamn five years old! At least, maybe.

* Why the hell did they make it a single word for the title of the game, but put a space between “Aeterno” and “Blade” in the actual name of the weapon? I swear, sometimes I think that Japan is purposefully making titular nomenclature as confusing as they can.

11 comments:

I suppose everyone fast enought and clever enought to realize her powers comes from the sword can just disarm her or chop her arm off.Then there are SMT protagonists, that are supposed to be normal humans but can defeat multiversal gods.

She does have time travel powers (maybe they require the sword, but I don't think she needs to use the sword with her hand/arm when she's knocked out), so I'm guessing that wouldn't be enough to kill or defeat her. I haven't played the game, though, so I could be wrong.

It had over 20 comments (although most didn't seem like they would contribute to a discussion), so maybe you should share rants for more popular games on websites like that, if you want more opinions or comments.

Well, there's certainly some truth to that. Sooner or later I'll have to devote some time to branching these rants out on the internet, figure out where the more active communities are and what rants I should share with them.